How To Grow Out Of It

You tried being vegan once, or maybe five times, in college. You wanted to give up animal products after reading Skinny Bitch. The logic made sense to you at the time: if you were eating animal hormones, it might fuck up your hormones and make you fat. The logic led you to buy countless soy Caramel Frappacinos from Starbucks. You’d drink one at 4pm and then pass out on your bed in your downtown apartment because the caffeine wasn’t holding up against all the sugar. 

There was the summer you were unemployed, but secretly happy about it because it meant you could hike 4 miles a day. You’d read all the nutrition books you could get your hands on, and measure hummus and Greek yogurt down to the ounce. You’d make daily trips to Trader Joe’s to buy apples, lean chicken, and just the right amount of lentils. 

You were crazy. You were a little bit crazy. 

There was the holiday season a few years back where you wouldn’t touch any cookies or cocoa or alcohol. You were exercising on the elliptical machine for 2 hours per day. You were making yourself miserable so that you could fit into a specific Christmas dress. 

There were the girls who lived across campus from your dorm room who became your friends and also the inspiration for your first diet. These were the girls who looked like they were satisfied by the first thing they tried on before rushing out the door to get to class. They told you they weren’t going to eat anything past noon on Halloween because their costumes would show their midriffs. A couple months later, they told you they were only going to eat lettuce for a few days. This sounded like a pretty good plan you you. How simple: eat only lettuce and lose a few pounds of water weight by the next morning. 

Then one day you decided not to eat anything. But 5:30pm rolled around, so you followed your friends to the dining hall to maybe just have a plain salad. But that’s not what you ate. You had pizza and a cheeseburger and loaded up at the cereal bar. You ate two servings of the french fries that looked like they’d been sitting out for a while. You hated yourself that night. 

You download Portia DeRossi’s memoir on your Kindle and were saddened by her all-too-familiar story. Her story that narrated the inner turmoil of an eating disorder and told you how things can quickly get out of hand. Her story that also gave you ideas of how-to. 

You’re twenty-two and you can’t sleep. An infomercial for Tracy Anderson’s newest workout DVD comes on and you’re entranced by the promise. You watch the entire commercial and pay $120 for the “system.” You count calories. You count reps. You count on losing 5 pounds in a week because there was that thing you were going to that weekend and that person you wanted to see.

You look up the term orthorexic and things start to make a little more sense.  

And there’s now. You haven’t worked out since August, which is the longest you’ve gone without exercising since you were 17. Mostly, you choose to eat healthy things. But sometimes, you choose to eat sweet, salty things that make your brain happy. You know that you can eat anything you want, you just choose to eat mostly whole foods. You understand that this is more empowering than over-sharing about what you “can’t" have. You sleep more, because you’re not getting up at 4:45am to get a 90 minute workout in. 

Now, you only check your weight at the doctor’s office, and you’ve never been this happy.